The British Eighteenth Century and the Postcolonial Moment challenges reigning cliches about 'modernity'. It intervenes in debates within current literary theory by means of a close engagement with texts from the British eighteenth-century, viewing the latter as a resource for the contemporary postcolonial future. Indeed, rather than 'applying' postcolonial theory to eighteenth-century texts, the book instead refines postcolonial theory by using such eighteenth-century authors as Swift, Gay, Johnson, Sterne, and Equiano. The book will interest eighteenth-century scholars, historians of the Enlightenment, scholars of postcolonial fiction, and literary historians following in the wake of Michel Foucault and Edward Said.

This book looks at Margaret Atwood's use of food motifs in speculative fiction. Focusing on six novels - The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments, the Maddaddam trilogy, and The Heart Goes Last - Katarina Labudova explores the environmental, ecological, and cultural questions at play and the possible future scenarios which emerge for humanity's survival in apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic conditions. Labudova argues that food has special relevance in these novels and that characters' hunger, limited food choices, culinary creativity and eating rituals are central to Atwood's depictions of hostile environments. She also links food to hierarchy, dominance and oppression in Atwood's novels, and foregrounds the problem of hunger, both psychological or physical, caused by pollution and loss of contact with the natural and authentic. The book shows how Atwood's writing draws from a range of genres, including apocalyptic fiction, science fiction, speculative fiction, dystopia, utopia, fairy tale, myth, and thriller - and how food is an important, highly versatile motif linking these intertextual threads.

This book focuses on health humanities in application. The field reflects many intellectual interests and practical applications, serving researchers, educators, students, health care practitioners, and community members wherever health and wellness and the humanities intersect. How we implement health humanities forms the core approach, and perspectives are global, including North America, Africa, Europe, and India. Emphasizing key developments in health humanities, the book's chapters examine applications, including reproductive health policy and arts-based research methods, black feminist approaches to health humanities pedagogy, artistic expressions of lived experience of the coronavirus, narratives of repair and re-articulation and creativity, cultural competency in physician-patient communication through dance, embodied dance practice as knowing and healing, interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity, eye tracking, ableism and disability, rethinking expertise in disability justice, disability and the Global South, coronavirus and Indian politics, visual storytelling in graphic medicine, and medical progress and racism in graphic fiction.

Generative Worlds. New Phenomenological Perspectives on Space and Time accounts for the phenomenological concept of generativity. In doing so, this book brings together several recent phenomenological studies on space and time. Generative studies in phenomenology propose new ways of conceiving space, time, and the relation between them. Edited by Luz Ascarate and Quentin Gailhac, the collection reveals new dimensions to topics such as the generation of life, birth, historicity, intersubjectivity, narrativity, institution, touching, and places, and in some cases, the contributors invert the classical definitions of space and time. These transformative readings are fruitful for the interdisciplinary exchange between philosophy and fields such as cosmology, psychology, and the social sciences. The contributors ask if phenomenology reaches its own concreteness through the study of generation and whether it manages to redefine certain dimensions of space and time which, in other orientations of the Husserlian method, remain too abstract and detached from the constitutive becoming of experience.

This book examines the conceptual, existential, and logical conditions under which the philosophical novel can be treated as a literary genre on a par with generally recognized literary genres, such as mystery, romantic, adventure, religious, or historical novel. Michael H. Mitias argues that the philosophical novel meets these conditions. He advances a detailed analysis of the concept of literary genre, and discusses the reasons which justify the claim that philosophical novel is a distinct literary genre. This is based on the assumption that philosophical ideas can be communicated metaphorically. An analysis of this assumption necessarily leads to a detailed discussion of the concept of metaphor and the extent to which it can be the vehicle of communicating philosophical truth.

This monograph is a study of the work of British author A. S. Byatt, exploring the cultural representation of the woman intellectual in her fiction. It argues that Byatt's representations of this figure show narratives of intellectual women to be inherently mythopoeic, or capable of restructuring the myth of the intellectual as male by default. This mythopoeia is, furthermore, intrinsically feminist in function, thus potentially broadening the conventional, limited view of women in intellectual history. The book will be the first study of Byatt's work to examine this figure in detail, and the first study of women intellectuals in historical and literary discourse to apply concepts of mythopoeia and sexual difference in ways that allow new readings of women's status and work in public spheres.

Narratives of Mediterranean Space: Literature and Art across Land and Sea presents a comparative analysis of contemporary literary and visual narratives of movement and migration produced in Italian, Arabic and French. It analyzes how these works create a dialogue across the Mediterranean Sea. By paying attention to the multiple ways in which the Mediterranean is being narrated by contemporary writers and artists, Silvia Caserta aims to propose a reconceptualization of the Mediterranean as a polyphonic space of movement and resistance. The Mediterranean space that emerges from this study is a space that, by virtue of the instability and porosity of its geographical and cultural borders, is able to overcome normative dichotomies between north and south, east and west, local and global. This book proposes the Mediterranean is a fruitful area from which to investigate the wider contradictions of the contemporary global world while avoiding the traps of "Mediterraneanism". For this reason, the book highlights the contradictions and dissonances that emerge from reading Mediterranean works, opening up multiple perspectives on the Sea and on the different lands that surround it.

It is a familiar story line in nineteenth-century English novels: a hero must choose between money and love, between the wealthy, materialistic, status-conscious woman who could enhance his social position and the poorer, altruistic, independent-minded woman whom he loves. Elsie B. Michie explains what this common marriage plot reveals about changing reactions to money in British culture.

It was in the novel that writers found space to articulate the anxieties surrounding money that developed along with the rise of capitalism in nineteenth-century England. Michie focuses in particular on the character of the wealthy heiress and how she, unlike her male counterpart, represents the tensions in British society between the desire for wealth and advancement and the fear that economic development would blur the traditional boundaries of social classes.

Michie explores how novelists of the period captured with particular vividness England's ambivalent emotional responses to its own financial successes and engaged questions identical to those raised by political economists and moral philosophers. Each chapter reads a novelist alongside a contemporary thinker, tracing the development of capitalism in Britain: Jane Austen and Adam Smith and the rise of commercial society, Frances Trollope and Thomas Robert Malthus and industrialism, Anthony Trollope and Walter Bagehot and the political influence of money, Margaret Oliphant and John Stuart Mill and professionalism and managerial capitalism, and Henry James and Georg Simmel and the shift of economic dominance from England to America.

Even the great romantic novels of the nineteenth century cannot disentangle themselves from the vulgar question of money. Michie's fresh reading of the marriage plot, and the choice between two women at its heart, shows it to be as much about politics and economics as it is about personal choice.

This book introduces Asian American literary studies by engaging the conditions, contingencies, and immediate and long-term effects of its major debates. Two rationales inform Ling's presentation of the field in this way: first is a felt need to provide recognizable contours and trajectories for the evolution of Asian American criticism as an ethnic-specific minoritarian formation in the United States; second is an imperative to historicize its practices - including polemics, controversies, and ideological ruptures - as an ongoing negotiation undertaken by Asian American critics for a more self-conscious and more adequate representation of the field's interests. These rationales are fully contextualized in the book's Introduction and Conclusion. The main body of this study is organized non-chronologically into 8 chapters, with each designed to reflect how the field has been energized by its demographic transformation, its growing intellectual heterogeneity, its defining moments, and its cross-cutting relationship with the trends in other disciplines. What has emerged and been given prominence to in the surveys and discussions of this book then constitute the essential criticism of Asian American literary studies, a discourse almost 5 decades in the making when examined retrospectively.

Children's Literature and Intergenerational Relationships: Encounters of the Playful Kind explores ways in which children's literature becomes the object and catalyst of play that brings younger and older generations closer to one another. Providing examples from diverse cultural and historical contexts, this collection argues that children's texts promote intergenerational play through the use of literary devices and graphic formats and that they may prompt joint play practices in the real world. The book offers a distinctive contribution to children's literature scholarship by shifting critical attention away from the difference and conflict between children and adults to the exploration of inter-age interdependencies as equally crucial aspects of human life, presenting a new perspective for all who research and work with children's culture in times of global aging.

Duality and the divided mind have been a source of perennial fascination for literary artists and especially for novelists, and this is seen to be particularly true of the Romantic generation and their later 19th century heirs.;This book deals with the double, or "doppelganger" as a dominant theme in the fiction of the period, and with its relation to the problem of evil. It suggests that the literary double flourished best when psychological and religious understandings of human dividedness were in harmony and declined when they began to grow apart.;Writers analyzed include E.T.A.Hoffmann, James Hogg, Poe, Dostoevsky and Stevenson and the final chapter relates the theme to the psychology of C.G.Jung.

Brings together philosophy, psychoanalysis and religious elements. Examines current 'crisis' in mental health and social stability. Unique in its contradictory orientation towards Christianity. Zizek, Baudrillard, Levinas and Steiner are strong influences on the author. Likely to appeal to academic followers of Jordan Peterson.

Traversing the themes of language, terror and representation, this is the first study to engage Coleridge through the sublime, showing him to have a compelling position in an ongoing conversation about finitude. Drawing on close readings of both his poetry and prose, it depicts Coleridge as a thinker of "the limit" with contemporary force.

A pioneering text in its first edition, this revised publication of Cognitive Poetics offers a rigorous and principled approach to literary reading and analysis. The second edition of this seminal text features: * updated theory, frameworks, and examples throughout, including new explanations of literary meaning, the power of reading, literary force, and emotion; * extended examples of literary texts from Old English to contemporary literature, covering genres including religious, realist, romantic, science fictional, and surrealist texts, and encompassing poetry, prose, and drama; * new chapters on the mind-modelling of character, the building of text-worlds, the feeling of immersion and ambience, and the resonant power of emotion in literature; * fully updated and accessible accounts of Cognitive Grammar, deictic shifts, prototypicality, conceptual framing, and metaphor in literary reading. Encouraging the reader to adopt a fresh approach to understanding literature and literary analyses, each chapter introduces a different framework within cognitive poetics and relates it to a literary text. Accessibly written and reader-focused, the book invites further explorations either individually or within a classroom setting. This thoroughly revised edition of Cognitive Poetics includes an expanded further reading section and updated explorations and discussion points, making it essential reading for students on literary theory and stylistics courses, as well as a fundamental tool for those studying critical theory, linguistics, and literary studies.

This book focuses on the cohering elements across various texts and traditions of India. It engages with several significant works from the Sanskrit tradition and emphasizes the need to move beyond colonial and postcolonial engagements with the enduring cultural pasts of India. The chapters are grouped in three main parts: accented rhythms, dispersed mnemoscapes and inventive iterations. It addresses questions such as: what enabled cultural communication across very divergent geographical, temporal, locational contexts and among different cultural formations of India over millennia? What is this shareable impulse that pulsates across the domains of dance, sculpture, painting, poetry, dharma, music, medicine, the lore of rivers and the epics? It explains how modern Indian languages and especially their creative and reflective nodes are unthinkable without the intricately woven textures of these interfaces and their responsive receptions. This book is of interest to philosophers, humanities students, researchers and professors as well as people interested in exploring alternatives to European traditions of thought without an alibi.

How does Cajun literature, emerging in the 1980s, represent the dynamic processes of remembering in Cajun culture? Known for its hybrid constitution and deeply ingrained oral traditions, Cajun culture provides an ideal testing ground for investigating the collective memory of a group. In particular, francophone and anglophone Cajun texts by such writers as Jean Arceneaux, Tim Gautreaux, Jeanne Castille, Zachary Richard, Ron Thibodeaux, Darrell Bourque, and Kirby Jambon reveal not only a shift from an oral to a written tradition. They also show hybrid perspectives on the Cajun collective memory. Based on recurring references to place, the texts also reflect on the (Acadian) past and reveal the innate ability of the Cajuns to adapt through repeated intertextual references. The Cajun collective memory is thus defined by a transnational outlook, a transversality cutting across various ethnic heritages to establish and legitimize a collective identity both amid the linguistic and cultural diversity in Louisiana, and in the face of American mainstream culture. Cajun Literature and Cajun Collective Memory represents the first analysis of the mnemonic strategies Cajun writers use to explore and sustain the Cajun identity and collective memory.

A groundbreaking study on the vital role of baroque theater in shaping modernist philosophy, literature, and performance. Finalist for the Outstanding Book Award by the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, Honorable Mention for the Balakian Prize by the International Comparative Literature Association, Winner of the Helen Tartar Book Subvention Award by the American Comparative Literature Association, Finalist of the MSA First Book Prize by the Modernist Studies Association Baroque style-with its emphasis on ostentation, adornment, and spectacle-might seem incompatible with the dominant forms of art since the Industrial Revolution, but between 1875 and 1935, European and American modernists connected to the theater became fascinated with it. In Baroque Modernity, Joseph Cermatori argues that the memory of seventeenth-century baroque stages helped produce new forms of theater, space, and experience around the turn of the twentieth century. In response, modern theater helped give rise to the development of the baroque as a modern philosophical idea. The book focuses on avant-gardists whose writing takes place between theory and performance: philosophical theater-makers and theatrical philosophers including Friedrich Nietzsche, Stephane Mallarme, Walter Benjamin, and Gertrude Stein. Moving between page and stage, this study tracks the remnants of seventeenth-century theater through modernist aesthetics across an array of otherwise disparate materials, including modern opera, Bertolt Brecht's Epic Theater, poetic tragedies, and miracle plays. By reexamining the twentieth century's engagements with Gianlorenzo Bernini, William Shakespeare, Claudio Monteverdi, Calderon de la Barca, and other seventeenth-century predecessors, the book delineates an enduring tradition of baroque performance. Along the way, Cermatori expands our familiar narratives of "the modern" and traces a history of theatricality that reverberates into the twenty-first century. Baroque Modernity will appeal to readers in a wide array of disciplines, including comparative literature, theater and performance, art and music history, intellectual history, and aesthetic theory.

Drawing on the work of Jacques Derrida, "Marking Time "presents an innovative account of literary time, in which the temporality and ontology of the literary are seen to be essentially intertwined. Individual chapters trace the stakes of this view of time for the status and 'economy' of the literary text across five 20th-century writers in French whose work is characterized by a fundamental and searching self-questioning: Maurice Blanchot, Samuel Beckett, Louis-Rene des Forets, Pierre Klossowski, and Roger Laporte. A final chapter draws on these analyses to develop an inherently unstable figure of 'saving time', which has important repercussions for how we conceive of literary value.

"Joseph Conrad and the Reader" is the first book fully devoted to Conrad's relation to the reader, visual theory and authorship. This challenging study proposes new approaches to modern literary criticism and deftly examines the limits of deconstructionist theories, introducing groundbreaking new theoretical concepts of reading and reception.